The first bridge made entirely of iron spans the River Severn in Shropshire, England. It was erected in 1779, when new blast-furnace technology made it cost-effective to produce large quantities of cast iron for the first time.
The men who built it had only ever seen bridges made of wood, brick or stone. So when assembling a structure of iron bars, they naturally followed the principles of carpentry. Look closely at the bridge, and you’ll see girders held together by dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joints, as if they were wooden beams.
It was several years before they were sufficiently familiar with the new material to develop new approaches, and build bridges that could never have been made out of wood.
The banks of the Severn were rich in coal, iron ore, limestone and clay, making it the perfect place to experiment with new manufacturing technologies. And the river itself enabled the manufacturers to ship their goods to market via the sea. Their innovations sparked a chain reaction of industrial, social and economic change that transformed the world.
The bridge now stands as a symbol of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and Ironbridge Gorge is a designated World Heritage site.
A few weeks ago I was working at Ironbridge, teaching emotional intelligence and internet marketing to a group of young creative entrepreneurs, as part of the Advance programme run by the wonderful Venu Dhupa. On the Saturday morning before I delivered my workshop, I walked along the gorge to look at the bridge.
On the one hand I was full of admiration for the engineers who had achieved such a remarkable first. On the other, there’s something old-fashioned and comical about a wooden bridge made of iron. The bridge showed how hard it is for us to break out of existing paradigms when trying to create something new.
A few years later, the bridges being built looked completely different. We’d entered a new world, and the Ironbridge looked like a throwback to an earlier time.
Yet the men who had built this quaint structure were pioneers, early adopters, creative pathfinders. They were the geeks of their age – the first ones to learn computer code, the first online, the first with mobile phones, the first bloggers, the first ones on Twitter.
Standing in the shadow of the old bridge, it was hard not to draw comparisons between the first Industrial Revolution and the one we’re going through at the moment.
And it made me wonder how our brave new world of social media and Web 2.0 will look in a few short years. To us, it’s new and exciting, and we feel like we’re at the cutting-edge. But if you look around, most of the things we’re building are still based on earlier paradigms.
The internet is a metaphorical world, and many of the metaphors hark back to physical structures and objects. So we have virtual ‘sites’, ‘stores’, ‘forums’, ‘mail’, ‘pages’ and ‘bookmarks’. The same goes for our ways of communicating and doing business – they are all unavoidably influenced by ways of living and working in the industrial era.
So the chances are a lot of our shiny new technology will soon look very quaint and old-fashioned. In future, people will look back and see the paradigms that constrain our thinking. It will take an effort of imagination for them to look at us without smiling indulgently.
Maybe that’s the irony of being an innovator. You can be so far ahead of your time that it’s hard to persuade people around you of the value of the new way of doing things. You don’t have the full picture yet, so you have to wing it and improvise. It feels new and daring.
Yet when history looks back, you will look provincial and old-fashioned. Like people posing for sepia photographs. Wearing knee breeches and funny hats. Stuffing arrows down the barrels of their muskets. Using dial-up modems. Clutching enormous mobile phones. Building wooden bridges out of iron.
Image by Anthony Kelly
What Do You Think?
Can you think of other inventions that struggled to escape from old ways of thinking?
Do you agree that much of our current technology and social structures will soon look like wooden bridges made of iron?
Have you seen any recent innovations that look like the start of something genuinely new?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a Coach for Artists, Creatives and Entrepreneurs. For a free 25-week guide to success as a creative professional, sign up for Mark’s course The Creative Pathfinder.
Bravo Mark; wonderful post. I love looking at time continuum comparisons.
You bring up a perfect example in cordless, then cell phones. Yes we all had the big bulky ones. At the time it was all technology could muster. But in the imagination, there were the tiny communicators in Star Trek (original TV series) perhaps the prototype of yesterday’s flip phones. Computer monitors follow the same trek.
Thanks for giving us something to ignite thought!
Talking of Star Trek, how come it’s 2010 and we still don’t have a teleporter…?
The teleporter physics is being worked … http://ronnyeo.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/teleportation-quantum-entanglement/
Good to know the boffins are on the case. I see there are still one or two teething issues:
Nice thinking! My connected thought is that many people will look at this bridge and say – “Gee we could have done this out of wood, why waste all of the time and energy”. It is the classic innovator’s dilemma.
And the funny thing is, for that particular bridge they may well have been right. I’m not sure why they didn’t use wood, but I’m guessing that at least part of the reason was they were so excited by their new discovery, they couldn’t wait to try it out…
I can’t think of any particular invention that struggled to escape the old way of thinking, but what comes to mind are people like Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln that struggled and fought to change the way people think.
They questioned the principles and defined what was old thinking versus new thinking and why the old thinking was unacceptable. They took a stand and unfortunately was assasinated for it (but that’s another story).
As a result of changing the way people think, it open the doors for new inventions, new businesses and new opportunties.
So, I have to wonder if we as a society start to question our thinking, why we think or believe what we do, where the information came from and the principles based on what we are doing, would we start to see a path for new inventions like we have never seen before?
In regards to social media, I do believe this will soon look like wooden bridges made of iron, but the need for “need to know” will still remain. I do believe the tools are there and now with twitter categories it may be time to string together.
Looking beyond communication (words) and identifying the message, principles and concepts that do connect and bring us to another level of creative innovations along with societies willingness to accept a new way of thinking.
Oh and that portal …. Gotta be somewhere, right? :0)
Yes social innovation is harder than technical innovation. And even when you’re dealing with ‘pure’ technical innovation, you still have to persuade others of the value of your ideas.
And let me know if you discover the portal. 😉
I’ve been rewatching old Space: 1999 episodes (an old favorite) and it’s amusing to see room sized computers and paper printouts everywhere. Best thing, though, was to see one of the characters using an honest-to-goodness typewriter! Even in 1999!
Yep, the future ain’t what it used to be…
It takes courage to take that first step. Knowing you’ll soon be considered quaint can’t be easy, yet without that first step, there would be no second, no third, and no innovation in areas we can’t yet conceive of.
Why? Because we have to walk there. If we look back from far enough distance, it may seem like a leap, but it was a walk, step by step, into the unknown taken by those not intimidated by knowing they will soon be quaint.
Those are heroes.
Very good point. We hear a lot about the gigantic leaps of imagination, but a lot of innovation is incremental.
Hmm – this got me thinking. Is there a difference between incremental innovation and the first steps towards disruptive innovation. Seems like Tassia was talking about the later, not the former.
Hmm, you could be right. Or maybe the one (sometimes) spills over into the other?
Great thinking, reminded me of something I heard the other day. it’s no longer what can I build/do but what should I build/do. Thanks
Agreed – depending on the criteria for deciding what one ‘should’ do. 😉
I’ll replace “should” with “will do” try to avoid should at all costs in my vocab normally. really good post, the choices are endless……perhaps that’s another post
Amen to that. 🙂
This reminds me of the early days of the web, where designers tried their hardest to make it emulate print. The amazing thing is that lately, now that designers have dropped that notion of forcing web design into size-bound constraints, embracing a more fluid concept of design, it has actually taken on more of a print aesthetic since web designers finally understand the hierarchies that make print work.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Plus ca change…
It can be a good thing for innovation to mimic what it replaces, it makes it more adoptable. Rogers points this out in this theory of innovation diffusion.
I’ve seen digital dials in cockpits that emulated their analog predecessors. Edison was careful to make electrical lights similar to the gas lamps they replaced, even using the gas pipes as wiring conduits.
It seems it takes a second or third generation of an innovation before it can move away from its strong ancestral ties.
I remember looking at a diskette and asking “What is that?” Young people today look at an icon of a diskette and ask “What is that and why does it mean ‘Save?'”
Great contrarian perspective! Yes, casting innovations in familiar shapes can not only make them more acceptable, they can actually make them more effective. E.g. the digital dials, which the pilots would be used to using.
Mark,
I’m not a big science fiction fan, but I think it may have a peculiar power to help us break through the wooden limitations we put on our ideas. I was recently reading an interview with Ray Bradbury in the Paris review and he had some fascinating things to say about ideas and science fiction. Pardon the long quote:
“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
So maybe all creators are writing science fiction without realising it? I feel like the character in Molière who discovered he’d been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. 😉
Like a bridge, paradigm shifts need to connect the old place we previously were to the new place we are currently going.
As a poet, I applaud your use of metaphor. 🙂
As a professional historian, I have to be a bit contrary about how we describe things of the past as being “old-fashioned” and “quaint.” That’s the easy way to look at things from the past and it smacks of a certain superiority. Frankly, I’d be really hard pressed to be able to use the tools of the past with anywhere near the facility our ancestors did. Plus, much of their stuff was built to last, while ours has been built to be disposable.
Good point Mary, and very close to the one I was trying to make, which may not have come across clearly.
The Ironbridge builders were innovators who laid the foundations for the future; the irony is that their bridge looks more old-fashioned than the more modern-looking later bridges, which were of course built by people standing on the shoulders of the innovators.
I’m also trying to challenge today’s innovators to push their innovations further by looking beyond their current mental models.
Plus I’m rather fond of knee-breeches. 😉
We could push today’s innovators by having them look at things from the past that they don’t recognize. Ever seen a bog shoe? Do you know how it was used?
How about khipu? I’m fascinated with khipu, the ancient Incan knot language. It still has not been translated, but those who study it say it was the earliest binary language.
http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/
The forgotten old can be as innovative as the undiscovered new.
No I haven’t but I want to now…
A bog shoe is a square piece of wood with a metal “strap” attached that can be tightened down on a horse’s hoof. Horses wore bog shoes during logging operations so they didn’t sink down into boggy or swampy areas. The one on exhibit at my museum was misidentified by the donor as a beaver trap.
“The irony of the bridge” – LOL. Was the pun intentional?
It’s good to know these little details are appreciated. 😉
There are lots of business processes which are still based on paper systems which have then been transferred to online or electronic systems, instead of thinking of how we would design this from scratch. Credit card payments, and most of the banking system is like this, but a lot of internal systems are similar, you just replace a quill pen and ledger with a spreadsheet.
And because a spreadsheet can contain more data, you spend more time filling it up, which is why some people argue computers don’t actually give us any more leisure time.
That’s why I switched from a digital to-do list manager to a post it note.
Vernor Vinge has a great science fiction book out, called: “Rainbows End” about the near future of computing. Game overlays of reality, social networks as financial entities, digitizing all libraries and then destroying the books, having to re-educate old people to new “remedial” occupations, because they can’t keep up with the real occupations. Well worth the read.
Ha ha that sounds great! On the Christmas reading list…
Keep on working, great job!